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Join me in Italy - Sept 2010!

Circling the issue of diversity

When
people meet my friend Dan, they often turn away from him, act like they’re suddenly
busy with lint in their pockets…anything to avoid looking at him or shaking
hands with him.

Why
this almost universal response?

It’s
simply because Dan has quadriplegia. Many people are fearful that they’ll do
something wrong when they meet him—they fear they won’t know how to shake hands
with him or how to talk to him—should they remain standing, should they kneel
beside his chair, should they offer to help him? So rather than deal with their
own anxiety about the situation, it’s just easier for them to move away.

Rather than navigate the treacherous waters of
difference, unable to determine the correct terminology for individuals or
groups of people (since the rules seem to change constantly), unsure of how to
relate to others and engage with them, many people have simply stopped
interacting with those different from themselves altogether. Rather than engage, we avoid because when
divergent views or different kinds of people meet, we often feel fearful,
awkward, and anxious. To avoid putting ourselves there, we increasingly avoid encounters
with difference altogether. We put ourselves in gated communities, both
literally and figuratively.

Rather
than err and describe an African-American person as black when they prefer
another term, we engineer ourselves out of situations where we’d need to make
that decision. Rather than risk offending a person who is Muslim by raising the
question of their religious beliefs and dress, we avoid them. Rather than be
rebuked for mentioning someone’s race—even though studies show that skin color
is the first thing we notice when meeting someone—we pretend we don’t notice
the difference.

The
result? More division, misunderstanding, distrust.

We
avoid difference to sanitize what is messy and to make ourselves feel more
comfortable. But life is messy. And learning
comes from discomfort. As Madame Curie has said, “dissymmetry causes
phenomenon.” Without the dissymmetry, there isn’t movement, innovation, change,
learning.

Perhaps
we have difficulty acknowledging and walking toward difference because we have
confused recognizing difference with making a judgment. One of the first employees I supervised was
an African-American woman named Annette. Once she overheard me describing to a
Board member who had never met her how he could recognize her in a meeting they
were both attending later in the week, a meeting at which Annette would be the
only African-American participant. Bemused, she listened to me use every other
possible descriptor: “Annette? Well, she’ll be the well-dressed young woman
with dark hair who is 5-feet, 6 inches tall. I’ll ask her to wear her name
tag.”

“Wouldn’t
it have been easier,” she said afterwards, “to tell him I’ll be the only
African-American there?” Why did I hesitate? I didn’t want to define her by her
skin color, I wasn’t sure if she preferred to be described as African-American
or black, and I had confused discussing difference with making a judgment.

We
learn from a young age not to acknowledge difference. When my older daughter
was quite young, she saw a man in a wheelchair at the grocery store one day.
“Mama!” she shouted, “that man has no legs!” My immediate reaction? “Shhhhh!” I
whispered. “It’s not polite to point.”

It
wasn’t new information to the man in the wheelchair that he had no legs,
anymore than it is news to my African-American friends that their skin is darker
than mine. By minimizing the difference and walking away from it, we lose the
ability to talk about it, to acknowledge the often unconscious judgments that
lie behind that discomfort, and to learn from and make the difference usable in
some way.

Gordon Allport, author of The Nature of Prejudice, built a model from his research at Harvard called "The Stages of Prejudice." Acts we know as wrong are included, such as discrimination and violence, but the first stage of prejudice might surprise you: avoidance.

Many
people talk about wanting a “colorblind” society in which we don’t notice
difference, but to ignore our differences by avoiding them is to render all of
our lives, identities, contributions, and backgrounds trivial. We must learn
how to talk about our differences,
not around them. We must move from
avoidance to engagement, from fear to creativity, from the vicious circle
to the virtuous circle.